Night Hunt, page 9
part #9 of Harbinger P.I. Series
“Yeah, I’m that guy.”
“You’re a PI or something, right?”
“I am.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen your office on Main Street. Do you think it’s real? Ghosts, I mean. Do you think people pass on to a heavenly afterlife, or do they get stuck as ghosts?” She sighed and then said, “I guess what I’m trying to say is, do you think Marcia and Steve are ghosts, haunting the old Dawson place?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think they’re ghosts.”
She frowned. “I was kind of hoping they might be. Then, when I went to the house, I might be able to see them. Or at least feel their presence. I guess that’s why I brought this picture and necklace; I hoped there might be some sort of connection with them if I had things they were close to in their lives.”
Tears began to roll down her cheeks. “God, I feel so foolish. What was I thinking, hoping my brother and best friend are ghosts? I must be crazy.”
“You’re not crazy. What you’re experiencing is totally natural.”
She wiped her eyes and smiled at me thinly. “I guess I should go home. Marcia said she’d come over later and until then, I can wallow in my misery.”
“Are your parents back from…” In my head, I replayed the conversation we’d had at her front door on Christmas Eve. “Florida?”
“No, they’re having trouble getting a flight. I’m surprised they’re even trying. Since we hit eighteen, Steve and I have been sidelined and our parents are all about going on vacation and cruising around the world, things they say they couldn’t do when we were kids. I think they only wanted one child, and when they ended up with twins, they resented us.”
“You and Steve are twins?”
“Yeah, and we have that special bond that most twins have. That’s another reason I thought that if I went to the Dawson place…” Her words trailed off and were replaced by tears.
I remained quiet and let her get the emotions out. She’d be shedding a lot of tears before the grieving process was over and I knew that it was better if she was allowed to do so without being interrupted.
When she was done, she looked at me with red-rimmed eyes and said, “Can I hire you to find Steve? I don’t mean find him, but communicate with him. You must do that sort of thing in your line of work. I can pay you whatever it takes.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t do that sort of thing,” I said gently.
“Well what the hell does a paranormal investigator do, if not talk to a client’s dead loved ones?” There was a touch of anger in her voice now.
“I help people who are having problems with things they can’t explain. Creatures. Curses. That kind of thing.”
“So you’re telling me you believe in weird creatures but not ghosts?”
“I didn’t say I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Forget it,” she said. “You’re no help at all.”
I could tell from the sudden stiffness in her body that she was about to drive away, either back to her house or to the Dawson place. I couldn’t let her go to the Dawson place and I didn’t like the idea of her going home alone.
“Listen, do you know Darla’s Diner? You would have passed it on the way here.”
She nodded. “Of course I know it.”
“Why don’t we go there and talk? There’s no point sitting in the middle of the road like this.” Also, getting her away from this area would make sure she didn’t go to the Dawson place and encounter Bud’s team.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Is this some kind of line?”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t a line. If it makes you feel better, you can pay for your own food at Darla’s.” Judging by her car, she could afford it.
She pursed her lips and studied my face, as if trying to read my thoughts. Then she said, “Okay, but you’re buying.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”
She looked at the road in front of her one last time, then seemed to make a decision and nodded. “See you there.”
I continued along the road. In my rearview mirror, the Porsche performed a U-turn and followed me.
At least there wasn’t anyone else following me. My bout of paranoia after leaving the Dawson place seemed to have been nothing more than that: paranoia. During the time I’d been parked on the road, no Society car had appeared behind me. The only people on the road had been Steve’s sister and me.
Still, I called Felicity just to make sure she and my father were okay. There might not be a Society spy on this road but that didn’t mean someone didn’t follow my Land Rover from the hospital and discovered my father’s whereabouts.
“Alec,” she said when she answered. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. I’m just calling you to say that my dad and I unknowingly crossed paths with a Society spy at the hospital. It’s possible that they, or someone else, could have followed us to Darla’s”
“Understood,” she said. “We’ll keep our eyes peeled.”
“Okay. See you later.”
“See you later, Alec.”
I hung up and continued to Darla’s. When I got there, the Porsche followed me into the parking lot and came to a stop next to my car. The girl got out and slipped her phone, which she’d been holding, into the back pocket of her jeans.
As I got out of the Land Rover, I said, “I’m Alec, by the way.”
“I know,” she said. “I did an Internet search on the way here. You’ve been in the media quite a lot, for someone who lives in this sleepy town. I’m Nicola. My friends call me Nicky. You can call me Nicola.”
“Okay, Nicola.” I indicated the diner. “Shall we get a table? You can tell me all about your brother and Tricia.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Is this some kind of therapy? You’re not going to try to counsel me, are you?”
“Nothing like that,” I said as we walked across the lot to the diner. “I’m qualified to hunt monsters, not offer counselling.”
We went inside. The place was a little less busy than it had been earlier, but the old tunes were still playing. Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was currently floating out through the speakers. I looked over at the table where I’d eaten with Felicity and my dad, but they’d already left, and the booth was empty.
“I warn you, I’m quite hungry,” Nicola said, sliding into a booth near the center of the diner.
I sat opposite her and said, “Order whatever you like.” Grief usually made people lose their appetites, but it didn’t seem to have affected hers at all.
Sandra came over and fought a losing battle with the surprised expression on her face when she saw me in here again after I’d left only a little while ago. “Oh, hello again. You just couldn’t stay away, huh? What can I get you?”
“I’ll just have a glass of water,” I told her.
She nodded and turned to Nicola.
“I’ll take a double burger, fries, and a chocolate milkshake,” Nicola said. “And a strawberry cheesecake for dessert.”
“Coming right up.” Sandra took our order to the kitchen.
“So” Nicola said, turning her attention to me. “Tell me about ghosts. Or the afterlife, or whatever. You were cagey earlier, but I have a feeling you’ve had some experiences. Tell me. I want to know everything.”
This was dangerous territory. She’d just lost her brother and her best friend, so of course questions about the afterlife were going to arise in her thoughts. The problem was that she was seeking answers and there weren’t any I could give her.
I’d seen enough things that surpassed the realm of normal human experience to have an open mind. I knew there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophies, as a famous playwright once said, but my understanding had come from experience. I couldn’t pass it on to Nicola, even if I wanted to.
And, despite everything I’d seen and experienced, I didn’t have any answers when it came to death and what lay beyond.
“I really don’t know what comes after,” I told her. “Although I’ve seen enough stuff in my life to be certain there’s something beyond, even if I’m not exactly sure what it is.”
“I hope so,” she said. “I hope Steve and Tricia and everyone else in that house moved on to a good place. I don’t mean Heaven necessarily, but somewhere that’s better than here.” She gestured vaguely at the room, but I knew she was referring to the world, and not just the diner.
“I guess I should consider myself lucky,” she said. “If it wasn’t for the fact that I was too sick to go to that party, I’d be dead too. It’s weird, but I don’t feel lucky. I don’t feel lucky at all. I feel kinda guilty.”
“That’s survivor’s guilt,” I said. “It’s totally understandable. Marcia will probably feel exactly the same.” I knew that Mallory had been experiencing survivor’s guilt for years. Mister Scary might not have killed the final girls, but he’d psychologically scarred them. As for the killing part, he seemed to be currently working on that.
“How is Marcia?” I asked.
Sandra arrived with the food and I had to wait for her to leave before Nicola answered. “She’s out of the hospital. She told me she feels fine. Then she told me some weird shit about a nightmare she’d had which wasn’t really a nightmare and you saved her, or something. And there are more girls like her who are trapped in this nightmare.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It all sounded pretty crazy.” She scrutinized me over a handful of French fries. “But not to you, right?”
“Weird is in my wheelhouse,” I said.
She nodded. “Yeah, I kinda figured that.”
Her phone, which was sitting on the table in front of her, suddenly vibrated and the sound of Beyonce’s Run the World began playing.
Nicola picked it up and looked at the screen. She put the phone to her ear and said, “Hi, Marcia. What’s up?” After a brief pause, during which I could hear Marcia’s voice on the other end of the line but not make out what she was saying, Nicola said, “I’m not at home because I’m in Darla’s with your hero, Alec Harbinger. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, see ya.”
She pressed the screen and put the phone back on the table. “Marcia arrived at my house early. She’s coming here.”
“Great,” I said. Since my last conversation with Marcia had been cut short by a doctor, and a nurse who had turned out to be a Society spy, it would be good to talk to her again. She might be able to give me more details about what had happened to her while the yaghul had trapped her essence in Shadow Land.
Running into Nicola by chance, which had led to me now being able to meet with Marcia again, seemed like a tremendous stroke of luck. I absent-mindedly pinched the sleeve of the “lucky” sweater the Blackwell sisters had given me and rubbed the fabric between my finger and thumb. Was my clothing responsible for the lucky encounter with Nicola?
I doubted it. The amount of magical potency required to make sure Nicola and I were on that road at precisely the same time would be immense. I knew the Blackwell sisters wielded a lot of power but the idea that they could enchant a sweater with so much magical energy seemed far-fetched.
Besides, if they had the ability to make such a powerful item of clothing, why would they give it to me? We’d helped each other out on occasion but we weren’t bosom buddies or anything like that.
So I guessed that meeting Nicola on the road by the Dawson place had been nothing more than a coincidence.
“Are you okay?” she asked as she picked up her burger. “You look like you’re pondering the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking about something.”
“Don’t tell me. Marcia’s nightmare, right? You really believe all that stuff she was saying about some guy trapping her inside a dream? It’s like Nightmare on Elm Street or something.”
“I do believe her,” I said.
She took a bite out of the burger. “Well, they say misery loves company. I guess craziness does, too.”
A bright blue Jeep Wrangler drove into the parking lot. Nicola pointed at it through the window. “That’s Marcia. She got here pretty fast.”
Marcia got out of the Wrangler and strode to the diner doors, head down and gaze fixed on the ground in front of her feet. She looked nervous. When she got inside, she spotted us and came over to our table.
Sliding into the booth next to Nicola, she looked at me across the table with anxious eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m being followed.”
I glanced out of the window at the parking lot. “Is it the press?”
“No, it isn’t the press.” She lowered her voice and took a deep breath before saying, “It’s him. It’s Mister Scary.”
Chapter 12
As soon as Marcia said those words, a darkness fell over the diner, accompanied by a biting cold. The nature of the luminosity, both inside and outside the building, became like twilight.
Nicola shifted in her seat uncomfortably and looked around the room. “What’s happening?”
“He’s here,” Marcia whispered, looking out through the window at the parking lot.
“Can I get you anything?” a voice said over my shoulder. I turned to see Sandra looking at Marcia, notepad and pencil poised in her hands. She seemed totally unaffected by the sudden dimming of the light and the cold that was permeating through the diner walls.
I looked at the other customers. They were eating, talking, and laughing with each other as if nothing was happening.
Marcia, who was staring through the window with wide eyes, hadn’t even noticed Sandra.
“She’s fine, thanks,” I told the waitress.
“You just let me know if you need anything else,” she said with a smile, before moving to another table.
For some reason, only Marcia, Nicola, and myself could detect the change in the atmosphere that heralded the coming of the yaghul.
We hadn’t shifted into the shadow version of Darla’s Diner, because if we had, then everyone around us would appear as nothing more than shadows. Yet I felt as if the veil between this world and the world of shadow had become thinner, like a sheet of dark, loosely wound silk that was not quite opaque.
“Oh my God,” Nicola murmured, following her friend’s gaze to the parking lot. “What the hell is that?”
I looked out through the window and saw a vehicle enter the lot. It looked like a 1940 Chevy pickup, the type with bulbous front fenders, arched hood, and a vertical radiator grille that made the front of the vehicle look like a toothy face.
But this was no ordinary vehicle. It seemed to be formed of smoke and shadow. It belched thick black exhaust fumes that drifted up into the air, then formed themselves into black smoky ravens that took wing and flew a couple of feet before vaporizing.
The black truck stopped in the middle of the parking lot and the driver’s door opened. A hooded figure got out and stood there, staring at the diner.
Mister Scary had taken a different form since the last time I’d seen him. His body, which was as smoky and shadowy as the truck, looked at least seven feet tall and so muscular that he could have won a Mister Universe contest, if he hadn’t been a yaghul from the Shadow Land who killed people in his spare time.
He wore a dark, hooded duster. The coat was open, revealing runes burning on his chest like red hot brands. The rest of his attire seemed to consist of black jeans and boots. A dark aura of inky vapor rose from his body and dissipated in the air a few feet above his hooded head.
He made no move toward the diner. He simply stood there, in the middle of the parking lot, waiting.
“Stay here,” I told Nicola and Marcia, as I got out of my seat.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere,” Nicola said, her gaze still fixed on the yaghul.
“Don’t go out there,” Marcia said, grabbing my arm as I walked past her towards the door.
“I have to,” I said.
I strode past the oblivious customers and stepped out into the darkened parking lot. I silently cursed the fact that all of my weapons were in the Land Rover, and Mister Scary stood between me and the vehicle.
His head turned in my direction and I saw two eyes within the darkness of the hood, glowing like coal embers.
“Harbinger,” he said, his voice seemingly coming from behind me, as if he were standing there and whispering into my ear. “When my connection to the girl was severed, I had no idea why. Now, I see you here, and it all becomes clear.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m the one who cut off your energy. I assume you’re here because you want to reconnect to Marcia. That isn’t going to happen, so get back into your little raven truck and go back to hell.”
“Stay out of this, Harbinger. The girl is nothing to you. To me, she is the foundation upon which my eternal life will be constructed.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “Like I said, that isn’t going to happen.”
Despite my bravado, I felt nervous. Waves of power seemed to emanate from him and push through the air on a tide of dark energy. He was more powerful than he’d been the last time we’d clashed. I wondered if that was because he’d been feeding on the souls of the other final girls.
I’d cut his connection to Marcia, but she’d seen the other four girls in the ceremonial circle. Even though he hadn’t yet performed the Harvest of the Maidens ceremony, the yaghul was obviously already deriving power from the essences he’d trapped inside that circle.
“You cannot face me and live,” he said, his voice devoid of any emotion. “Do not stand in my way.”
“The trouble is, standing in the bad guy’s way is kinda my thing,” I told him. In my mind, I was trying to picture the green magic circle, the part of the Melandra Codex that let me summon up a shield. I had a feeling Scary was about to blast me with something to prove his point.
He took a step toward the diner. I took a step toward him.
